[governance] Can a bit tax bring a New Wealth of Nations?

[Daniel Kalchev]

On Sep 28, 2011, at 18:50 , Roland Perry wrote:

> 
> Of course, you'd have to make sure each bit wasn't inadvertently taxed twice on its journey, so we need to invent something akin to "stamp duty", where once the bit has been taxed it's marked as paid up. Doing this per byte sounds best, so you need an International Treaty to declare that every byte now has nine bits - the eight bits of data and the one "stamp duty bit" which says bit-tax has been paid.
> 
That 9 bits per byte are fine, except you need space for the stamp itself. A slim (few kilobytes) digital signature of the tax authority should be attached to each byte.

Setting up the customs infrastructure might incur additional bureaucratic costs as well as uncertain delays, while bytes are stopped at national borders for inspection and re-stamping.

A byte (all those eight bits, indeed) that has travelled all over the globe and has collected all the national tax stamp signatures might become valuable for collectors.

Daniel

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